In before the buzzer! Or before the clock strikes midnight and my carriage turns back into a pumpkin? Whatever. It’s still Monday here for a few more minutes so I’m going to make a post!
Happy Monday, friends! For today’s Malapropism Monday I have just a short one — mixing up “prescribe” and “proscribe.” This is one I’ve seen online and in TV closed captioning, and it’s one that spell checkers won’t catch because they’re both real words. The problem is, they have vastly different — almost opposite — meanings.
Happy Monday, everyone! Well, for most of us in the US it may not be the happiest of Mondays due to the “spring forward” daylight saving time that stole an hour of our sleep this weekend!
Personally, I do enjoy having more daylight in the summer, but the clock change in the spring is tough, isn’t it? Even getting the hour back in the fall doesn’t work out so well when you have young kids as I do. Somehow their little bodies don’t get the message that we can all sleep in longer.
It’s Monday again! Exciting, right? For today’s Malapropism Monday I’d like to bring up yet another writing and speech pattern that bugs me! I know you’re dying to find out about it.
Today’s topic is the use of “try and ____” vs. “try to ____.” Did you know that these are not interchangeable? People often say “try and ____” when they should say “try to ____.” Or, at least in my opinion, they should…
It’s Monday again! You know what that means, right? I still have some malapropisms left on my list, so I’ll continue with this series a while longer.
Today I wanted to focus on the use and misuse of “compliment” and “complement.” This is a pair of words that people mix up all the time, in my experience. In fact, I mentioned it in my recent post on TokyoTreat snack subscription boxes. Here’s a screenshot from their (overall enjoyable and well-done) magazine that comes in the box:
It’s a bit late here for today’s Malapropism Monday post due to today being Presidents Day — in the AP writing style there is no apostrophe — here in the US.
Today’s malapropism will be a short and quick one, because I’m tired after wrangling a couple of kids through the rain. Speaking of tiredness have you ever seen “weary” written in place of “wary”? I do all the time. People will say things such as, “I’m really weary of the new policies at work — I don’t think they’ll have a positive effect on absenteeism.” It’s not likely that you can be weary of a new policy, right? Weary means tired or fatigued. I suppose it’s possible, but not very likely.
The more apropos word in that situation would be “wary,” which means “watchful, cautious, or alert” according to Dictionary.com. It’s also possible that you could mean to say you’re “leery” of a policy, since leery means “suspicious” and is a synonym of “wary.” You could say I’m weary of seeing this error and wary whenever I see the word “weary,” and I’m leery of the misuse of these words!
Anyway, the reason my post is late today is because my family and I went to San Francisco since we all had the day off of work and school. We’ve only lived in the Bay Area for a few months, so there’s still a lot we haven’t seen here. There was rain all day long, so we didn’t spend as much time outside walking as we would have liked to, but we had lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe (a family favorite anywhere in the world we can find one) followed by some walking around Pier 39 and a bit of driving tourism.
Here are a few photos from today:
Another week, another Monday, another Malapropism Monday here! It’s been a pretty busy day — there’s only an hour left of Monday in my time zone — but I want to maintain the habit. This will be a short one, but something I see all the time nonetheless. In my Read more…
First of all, do you know what a “malapropism” is? It’s the misuse of a word, often similar in sound to the apropos word, which changes the meaning of the sentence to something ridiculous. See what I did there? I used the word “apropos,” which means “appropriate” or “pertinent.” The Read more…